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design in the kleiner perkins family

as you may have caught last week, kleiner announced a new program around supporting design as a craft. we all worked really hard to put this together and are grateful for the support from our founders and former colleagues to make this happen. and, we were lucky to get some great coverage for it too. in a nutshell, as we learned from our engineering fellows program, we wanted to devise an infrastructure where we could help emerging designers get great, hands-on experience and match them with designers who are already practicing in their field. the result is the creation of a design fellows program, which designers can apply to, and a design council, which will help mentor the next generation of great interface creators.

i also wanted to share, from an engineer’s perspective, just how critical design is which I fully appreciated during our development of webOS. everyone knows it takes great engineers and designers to create great products. twenty years ago, engineers had to create all UI, as not many others knew how to build in MFC. ten years ago, designers were doing production work, but interaction design was really nonexistent. fast-forward to today, and a design team is focused on human interaction, including user research, visual design, and interaction design. a few years ago when i was at palm, the webOS design team worked with the development team through a process to ship v1.0 and 11 post-releases (shout out to matias duarte). as we were leading these discussions, we fielded ideas from both designers and engineers, but at the end of the day, designers won the vote (pending the ability for engineering to execute, of course).

but as products get more complicated and have more usage, product managers emerge to handle product management, communication, and advocate for the customer. the problem here is that having too many PMs in the kitchen fighting over turf, credit, and features, the engineering team can get thrown in all sorts of directions. it’s not that different from politics, in some cases! and in the case of engineers, they oftentimes are called on to build *and* maintain, the latter which is often greatly underestimated and can be a thankless job in and of itself. more on this topic in a later post.

i’m not an expert in organizational structures, so i’m only speaking here from first-hand experience from company building, intuition, and gut. for each product or company, there’s an optimal number/ratio of engineers, designers, and PMs…all play a crucial role. at kleiner, and looking ahead to how these structures evolve, especially as phones and tablets become customers’ primary computing devices, the importance of design will — we believe — only grow. this is not to say that engineering or product management will recede, but rather to acknowledge that building strong, deep capabilities and networks in this artful skill will be a great benefit to everyone in the kleiner family.

the next evolution of the designer/engineer founding team may be the addition of a domain expert which would culminate in cross-disciplinary innovation – but lets discuss that in a future post.